Privacy Death Watch: Two Startups Want To Make Your Email And Voicemail Public

If you think online oversharing is out of control now, just wait: two new startups are working to make email and voicemail public and searchable.

Audioo, launched last month at TechCrunch Disrupt, is a service that lets people publicly share their voicemail messages. The idea, targeted primarily at college students, is for users to selectively upload the funniest messages they receive; voicemail from drunk friends, for instance. Uploaded messages are automatically transcribed and tagged for ease of search.

But there's room for this to grow into much more than that. Voicemail is "the next frontier of exhibitionism," CEO Ryan Born says. The company is currently working on technology that would let Google Voice automatically upload all of your voicemail to Audioo as it comes in.

Meanwhile, Cc:Everybody wants to offer essentially the same service for email. This startup offers free "public email addresses", to use alongside your old-fashioned, private email. When someone sends a message to your public email, everyone can see it. If you reply, then, by default, everyone can see that. Essentially, Cc:Everybody is taking the concept of the open letter and running with it.

We can see plenty of use for both of these services in limited cases. The frightening thing, though, is that we can't rule out their being used in not-so-limited cases. We don't think anyone is going to start sharing their voicemail by default, or making an open email address their primary mode of communication. But then, we didn't think anyone would use Blippy, either.